Social gaming. The mere utterance of that phrase is enough to send a shiver down the spines of "hardcore" console players. For many, what Facebook brings to mind as a games platform is a plague of aimless farming sims, designed to draw hapless web users into endless Skinner boxes. And up there, looming over it all is Zynga, social gaming's Ming the Merciless.

But is it really like that? Has the first 10 years of Facebook gaming brought us nothing but the ability to share cows with our friends? No, of course that's not true. Not entirely. Here are the 10 things Facebook gaming has done for us.

The idea of appointment gaming

Traditional video games are all about immersion – they're about long sessions of dedicated playing, which makes them unsuitable for time-poor players. Facebook, however, popularised a form of game design in which participants can keep nipping back in throughout the day, perhaps to check on the progress of a new ride construction in Rollercoaster Tycoon or to stop crops from spoiling in Farmville. This structure not only allowed people to use games as a quick diversion amid other tasks, it also cleverly turned the games themselves into "to do" lists, so they resembled work, and therefore provided similar levels of satisfaction. But in a fun way.

The rise of free-to-play

Of course, the ability to play a game for nothing and then pay money for extra content or in-game items has been around for many years, but it was turned into something of an artform by Facebook publishers like Zynga. The key games thrived on two important game mechanics: the concept of "energy" which limited play time and required players to pay real money to get past barriers; and the prevalence of virtual currencies, such as gems or gold coins, which deviously introduces ambiguity into cash purchases. But while F2P is all too easily written off as intrinsically evil, it has massively expanded the gaming audience by lowering that pay-upfront barrier that traditional boxed games erect. "Free-to-play changed the whole mindset of design," says Mark Robinson, chief operating officer of data technology firm, DeltaDNA. "Developers went from releasing boxed products to creating and managing a service, and suddenly there was an opportunity to develop very strong relationships with their customers." Now both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are experimenting with free-to-play mechanics, no doubt hoping to learn from the rather exploitative practices of old.

The death of challenge

The standard criticism core gamers throw at titles like Farmville is that they're not really games; they are virtual cyclical activities with no genuine sense of competition. And yet at its peak, Farmville attracted 85 million people who didn't seem to care. "Games don't have to punish players," says Oscar Clark, a gaming evangelist at EveryPlay. "A lot of the games we grew up with were about how devious the designers could be and how much they could punish failure. But Facebook players don't put up with that bullshit." Mark Robinson concurs: "Facebook allowed us to collect data on players and then optimise and personalise the experience – if you're not that confident a player, you get the easier version of the game so you don't feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall." Robinson refers to good social game design as the Goldilocks approach: make it not too easy but never too hard. This approach has now spread to console games, with most titles now providing 'easy' modes for complete novices, as well as lots of in-game hints and tutorials.

Frontloading the fun

In traditional video games, playerspay up front for the experience so they're already investedand designers can afford to build slowly toward the most exciting enemies and best set-piece battles. Alongside free-to-play mobile titles, Facebook games have had to develop a new approach to design in which players are immediately engaged – as there's no cost, the "churn rate" is huge. "The first 60 seconds has got to be incredibly engaging," says Robinson. "The players haven't committed any money but you need them to commit time - you need to build your retention rates. In the game environment you need to be able to quickly calculate how competent a player is and adjust the environment accordingly."

Asynchronous multiplayer gaming

Again, Facebook developers didn't invent the concept of turn-based head-to-head games, but they made the most of a platform that allowed friends to play against each other over the course of hours or days – without ever having to be online at the same time. The key early example was Scrabulous, the Scrabble-like word game that drew in five million users a month through 2007; this has been superceded by Words With Friends by NewToy,Inc, a studio later bought by Zynga. Asynchronous multiplayer is important in our connected era, because it acknowledges that we love to play with other people, but we're not always available at the same time – and it makes a feature out of that. Console games have now adopted and adapted the model, so you get titles like Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit which tells you the best lap times of your friends so you can compete against them even when they're not around.

The compulsion loop is everything

Games have always had feedback loops – repetitive actions that reward the player. You achieve something, you get access to new content, the new content requires you to achieve something, and so on. But social games have turned this into an absolute science. The most successful titles – the ones that monetise the most players – are usually entirely open-ended, supplying the player with a constantly evolving set of activities that are never really completed. So Farmville is essentially a series of interlocking systems based around planting crops, harvesting them and getting in-game cash to spend on new items – which can then be fed back into the agricultural process. "Facebook games have allowed us to understand that there are these processes going on in our brains," says Clark. "There are rewards that we get from repetitive actions, and designers can utilise these to make a more satisfying experience. Of course this can be abused, but the inherent idea isn't bad, it just means we have to realise that in order to make better games we have to understand human behaviour."

Mass gaming's first majority female audience

Traditional console gaming is dominated by the young male demographic and this was always the target audience of the major publishers. But Facebook changed that. Titles like Farmville, Bejeweled and Cafe World, quickly drew in a vast user-base of female gamers, and even more elusively, older female gamers. A survey commissioned by game developer Popcap in 2010 found that the average social gamer was a 43-year-old woman; three years earlier, major Facebook publisher Wooga found that 70 percent of its audience was female. "I did some research back in 2002 on how to attract female gamers," says Oscar Clark, who has also written a book – Games As A Service: How Free To Play Design Can Make Better Games – on the science of social gaming. "We asked women why they didn't play. A lot said that they needed to give themselves permission to play and they needed a social context. Facebook games provided both of those – you can play for a minute here and a minute there, so it's easier to give yourself permission, and the social element makes it easier as well. But it wasn't just women, Facebook opened up games to a whole range of demographics who wanted usually have played games."

Caring and sharing

Facebook games have always relied on virality. In 2007 it was all about Blake Commagere and AJ Olson's vampire, zombie and werewolf biting games, which required players to recruit Facebook friends into their monster covens. Then, agricultural sims like Farm Town and Farmville started rewarding players for helping others and sharing items. Brilliantly, it meant that the marketing was built into the game mechanic, spreading the brand through social circles. Facebook started cracking down on viral content in 2010, reducing the amount that developers could 'spam' the Facebook walls of its players, but the concept of being able to share in-game achievements with friends has spread out to every sector of gaming.

No wait, iteration is everything

In the past, the games industry was built around a simple business model: fire and forget. Developers made a game, released it then moved on to something else. The arrival of digital distribution changed that, allowing publishers to release add-on packs for current console games, but Facebook developers took it a step further. Here, the standard model quickly became, release a game, study how people play it (where they get stuck, what items they like, where they 'convert' to paying customers) and then tweak the structure accordingly. At its height, Zynga had a huge data analysis division dedicated to studying player behaviours and changing the flow of its games accordingly. While he was head of the developer's analysis team, Ken Rudin famously declared, "We’re an analytics company masquerading as a games company." The whole games industry now uses player analysis and iteration to alter games post-release. And now Rubin is head of analytics at Facebook, which is effectively an analytics company masquerading as a social network.

The social network as lobby system

Increasingly, developers are moving their games off Facebook as user habits change. "The closing of the viral channels was essentially the end of the gold rush," says game designer Will Luton. "Since then, Facebook gaming has been on the decline as everyone shifts focus to smartphones. Facebook is now more of a facilitator of social connections for mobile games than a platform in itself." What we're now seeing is mobile, console and PC games using Facebook as a convenient way to add social connectivity into their titles. Players don't have to join a dedicated social system for every title they play, they can just sign into Facebook and have access to all their friends. This is why PlayStation 4 now gives owners the opportunity to log-in via a Facebook account – it immediately perosnalises and broadens the possibilities of multiplayer gaming. People might not be going on to Facebook to play games as much anymore – instead, Facebook is going on to their games.

In many ways, then, Facebook opened up some of the mechanics of games to a whole new audience, and in doing so, sent shock waves through the whole industry. Its conventions of accessibility and compulsion have infuriated many critics. As veteran game designer Martin Hollis says, "Dual currency systems, relentlessly pestering dialogs nagging you to post the game to your friends, and the premeditated wearing down of players by the three-step process: giving them a little quick progress, showing them a lighthouse or mountain top to yearn for, and then delivering the absolute choice between glacial free progress or fast progress by inserting real money. At the darkest end there is a roster of abusive and manipulative techniques not unlike those used by pick up artists and casinos."

But then Facebook also democratised gaming in ways that were truly valuable. "The legacy of Facebook in games is an important one," says Luton. "It was the first platform that snuck in to almost everyone's lives and delivered games for free, right there. Before that you had to make some conscious decision to buy hardware and a game to play.

"Before Facebook you had to say, 'I'm a gamer, I play games, I buy games' and because of that the games industry was in fan service to its loyal, albeit small, market who demanded skill challenges and traditionally masculine pursuits like football, cars and guns. I was at SEGA as a junior just before Facebook gaming happened and pitched this idea about running a farm. I was told "don't be stupid, people don't want to farm, they want to feel cool". Then FarmVille happened and everyone was totally perplexed – the most successful game in the world wasn't a big graphical extravaganza in space, but a game where you waited for crops to grow. And your mum was playing it."

• This article was amended on 14 March 2014 because the original referred to the data technology firm GamesAnalytics. This company is now called DeltaDNA.